Open source software is commonly portrayed as a meritocracy,
where decisions are based solely on their technical merit.
However, literature on open source suggests a complex social
structure underlying the meritocracy. Social work environments
such as GitHub make the relationships between users and
between users and work artifacts transparent. This transparency
enables developers to better use information such as technical
value and social connections when making work decisions. We
present a study on open source software contribution in GitHub
that focuses on the task of evaluating pull requests, which are one
of the primary methods for contributing code in GitHub. We
analyzed the association of various technical and social measures
with the likelihood of contribution acceptance. We found that
project managers made use of information signaling both good
technical contribution practices for a pull request and the strength
of the social connection between the submitter and project
manager when evaluating pull requests. Pull requests with many
comments were much less likely to be accepted, moderated by
the submitter's prior interaction in the project. Well-established
projects were more conservative in accepting pull requests. These
findings provide evidence that developers use both technical and
social information when evaluating potential contributions to
open source software projects
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Let's talk about it: evaluating contributions through discussion in GitHub
Open source software projects often rely on code contributions from a wide variety of developers to extend the capabilities of their software. Project members evaluate these contributions and often engage in extended discussions to decide whether to integrate changes. These discussions have important implications for project management regarding new contributors and evolution of project requirements and direction. We present a study of how developers in open work environments evaluate and discuss pull requests, a primary method of contribution in GitHub, analyzing a sample of extended discussions around pull requests and interviews with GitHub developers. We found that developers raised issues around contributions over both the appropriateness of the problem that the submitter attempted to solve and the correctness of the implemented solution. Both core project members and third-party stakeholders discussed and sometimes implemented alternative solutions to address these issues. Different stakeholders also influenced the outcome of the evaluation by eliciting support from different communities such as dependent projects or even companies. We also found that evaluation outcomes may be more complex than simply acceptance or rejection. In some cases, although a submitter's contribution was rejected, the core team fulfilled the submitter's technical goals by implementing an alternative solution. We found that the level of a submitter's prior interaction on a project changed how politely developers discussed the contribution and the nature of proposed alternative solutions.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10038371
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 144 to 154
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/2635868.2635882
